


and all i need's a starting place

by tosca1390



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-13
Updated: 2013-07-13
Packaged: 2017-12-19 07:55:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/881348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tosca1390/pseuds/tosca1390
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They’ve always just been breaths away from one bad decision or another; what makes this any different?</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	and all i need's a starting place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magisterequitum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magisterequitum/gifts).



> AU from the end of S2 - Jenna doesn't die, but becomes a vampire. Elena also becomes a vampire at this point too. 
> 
> For Jordan, for her birthday.

*

It’s John who tells Jenna to stay inside, stay at the Salvatore house, no matter what. 

“But it’s Elena – “

“No, it isn’t,” he says sharply through the phone, in that holier-than-thou bitch-ass way of his that she’s hated for years. “She’s with Stefan. For all intents and purposes, she’s safe.”

Jenna rocks on her heels, her fingers clenched hard around her phone as she holds it to her ear. The house is too quiet. Alaric is gone with Damon, and she is alone. The terrifying knowledge of the last few days is still sinking in, and she can’t believe how blind, how utterly moronic she’s been this whole time. Here, John has the upper hand. She can’t stand it. 

Alaric said, before he left, that he would make it right with her. She doesn’t know how. It doesn’t seem possible, here in the dark scarlet hallways of the Salvatore house, where she is alone. Secrets surround her, envelope her, and she hates it; she can taste the lies in the air. 

“If you all had just told me from the first, this never would have happened,” she says at last, voice hard. 

John is silent at the other end of the phone. She hangs up, and feels the hollow ring of victory in her fingertips. 

She is going to stay in the house – really, she is. But it rattles with emptiness, with the betrayal of those she trusted once and always, and she needs air. One step outside onto the front porch, into the cool night air, is all it takes; she remembers darkness, a pain at her throat and the thick slide of blood in her mouth, and then nothing. 

When she wakes, there is the woods, the dry leaves under her, the thirst for blood. Elena cries as Jenna drinks; she feels the contraction of her veins at the corners of her eyes, the slide of young fangs, the curl of Klaus’s hand at her throat, forcing the transition. Stefan is all low wrecked moans, Elena is muffled sobs, and Jenna wants to make it stop, to go back to when Miranda and Grayson were alive and this wasn’t anyone’s reality except in nightmares and tall tales. The stake in her heart catches her off-guard; it is death again, with blood still wet on her lips. 

Then, in the cold stiffness of the dead, her fingers flex in the leaves. She opens her eyes into the smoky pre-dawn sky, alone in a circle of blood and magic. She waits for no one’s help; she pulls the stake from her chest, her skin knitting together as the hunger awakens, settles low in the pit of her stomach. 

She is undead, and alone. 

*

Jenna stumbles up to the steps of the old farmhouse, all but crawling up the front porch, escaping the sunlight as it chases her. She curls up with a loud thud, her limbs strange to her even as she’s known them all her life. There is nothing in her now but hunger, a new life crawling through her cold veins. 

The front door opens; she can see the toes of Elena’s sneakers through the slits of her gaze. 

Elena shrieks her name. Elena is _alive_. 

Jenna lifts her gaze as Elena drops to her knees next to her, cold hands on her shoulders. In them, she sees the same hunger she feels. 

“Oh _no_ ,” Jenna breathes as her cold fingers tangle with Elena’s.

“It’s okay,” Elena says, voice tearful. She still looks so young, so terribly young and yet ancient. _Forgive me, Miranda_. “Oh – oh, Jenna – “

“How – how?” Jenna babbles, as Jeremy and then Damon come onto the porch, lifting them to their feet and bringing them inside. 

They give her blood, and look to her injuries. There is an explanation in their eyes that she can’t read (that she doesn’t want to read). She sits with Elena and Jeremy (Jeremy is warm, too warm to the touch, and she can’t look at the pulse in his throat or wrist or think of the blood under his skin oh no), and together they wait for dusk, for the disappearance of the sun. No one speaks. There seems to be nothing to say, except apologies; Jenna doesn’t want any more of those. 

Elijah is waiting at the Gilbert home when they arrive, with John. Jeremy has to invite both her and Elena in, a splash of cold realization over the both of them. That’s when they tell her: Alaric is dead, sacrificing himself for the sake of Bonnie’s magic and Jenna’s survival. 

She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t say a word. Instead, Jenna tucks Elena and Jeremy into bed, and sits in her dark bedroom with an icy-cold bottle of vodka, and enjoys the sharp sting of the alcohol in her throat. It takes away the taste of blood. 

It doesn’t take away her hunger. 

*

“I told you to stay in the house.”

Jenna slams the refrigerator door shut, empty-handed. She can feel the slide of her black dress against her thighs and shoulders as she moves, lace and cotton and mourning. Alaric’s funeral is eight hours past, and the house is just emptying from the wake. Elena and her friends – Bonnie, Caroline, Matt, and the Salvatore brothers, Damon looking quite worse for the wear – have sequestered themselves on the porch. Jeremy is upstairs. It is just her and John with years and miles and death now between them. 

“This is not helpful in the least,” she says at last. It’s the first time she’s spoken to John in days. 

He leans against the edge of the island, tilting his chin up. She can hear the pulse in his throat, sweet and heavy and thick in her ears. “At least you wouldn’t be – well – “

“A nightmare come true?” she drawls. “Try to keep your revulsion to a low simmer.”

“I don’t know what you were thinking.”

“You never did know how to quit beating a dead horse,” she says icily. “It’s done. Elena and I –we are what we are.”

John glowers, face reddening. She can smell the anger, the frustration coming off his skin in waves. Her fingers curl into her palms, a hunger settling low and hot in her middle. The blood from the banks hasn’t been enough. She wants contact, skin-on-skin; everyone else is terrified she’ll snap, but John keeps inching closer and closer. They’ve always just been breaths away from one bad decision or another; what makes this any different?

“We are what we are,” she repeats, voice cracking. She thinks of Elena, a girl born of sunshine and light from wretched circumstances, pulled into the whorls and eddies of this town’s dark history, of her ancestors’ mistakes. Elena is different, painfully so; she is harder, stronger, sharper. It pains Jenna to see, because it shouldn’t have been like this. Nothing should have been as it is now. 

Jenna leans back against the door of the fridge, staring at John. Her daylight necklace sits at her collarbones, fresh from Bonnie just yesterday. She had gotten three compliments on it at the wake, and it almost made her collapse into laughter. 

“Are you sticking around this time?” she asks at last. That’s the real question, what with his estranged daughter a vampire, and all of them waiting with baited breath for Klaus’s next move. 

He exhales sharply, rubbing a hand over his hair and scalp. There is age and weariness sinking into his eyes, the lines of his mouth. She thinks of what they all used to be in this town, young and carefree, in the woods and behind the bleachers. Now there’s nowhere safe here. 

“Yes,” he says at last, meeting her eyes. “I’m staying.”

Jenna’s skin curdles with shivers. She touches the loose waves of her hair, then smooths her palms over her dress. 

“The guest bedroom is all yours,” she says, because where else can he go?

*

John’s moving into the Gilbert home permanently is barely a blip on Elena’s radar, considering Stefan running off with Klaus, and Damon nearly dying from a werewolf bite. All she says, when she finally speaks on it, is: _Good. Someone to train with_. 

Jenna finishes her thesis as she listens to John and Damon and Jeremy bicker in the yard during those summer afternoons. There are adventures in the woods with crossbows and self-defense techniques, the heavy leafy trees shielding them all from view. She watches Elena shape herself into her own kind of warrior in those weeks, as the silence from Stefan stretches out into worrying reports from towns around the South, of murders and kidnappings in patterns all too familiar to Damon. In the evenings, Jenna and John make dinner together more often than not, mostly in silence. 

In the quiet of her bedroom, one she has barely begun to think of as hers and not Miranda and Grayson’s, she lays awake and listens to the sound of the house breathing, of Elena and Jeremy restless just doors away. Nightmares are frequent, but she is never called for; they have all learned how to battle their own demons, at this point. 

There are nights when Elena and Jeremy are out, and it’s just the guardian and the absent father alone in a house full of ghosts. Those are the nights when she hears him shift, can almost imagine the curl of his palm against himself under the sheets. She hears John a floor away, can sense the creak of his bed, hear the sharp intake of his breath in the night, the jump of his heart rate. Then sometimes when she touches herself, slick and hot between her thighs, her cheek pressed into the cool pillowcase. She feels as a voyeur; but in the mornings, John’s gaze is heavy on her, dark and wanting in an unfamiliar way, and she sits with a very different sort of hunger.

*

It’s been two months. Mystic Falls is thick with humidity and heat; every morning is hazy, and every evening restless and uncomfortable. The air conditioning in the house is on the fritz. Elena and Jeremy are at Caroline’s, a party of some kind. John is nowhere to be found. Jenna’s hair sticks to the nape of her neck, every curve and crevice of her skin shiny with sweat. By six in the evening, she gives up, and goes to the Grill. 

When she sits down at the bar, blessing the air conditioning under her breath, Mack the bartender says a surprised hello and makes her a margarita on the rocks with salt. Jenna swallows it quickly, her teeth burning with the chill. Her appearances out are rare now. Everyone she really knows thinks it’s because of Alaric, and she supposes that’s a part of it. But there’s something strangely detached about how she feels for this town, even more so than her teenage angst and her rebellious early twenties full of escape. This town has brought nothing but horror to her family and friends, and she can look at it now for what it is: a cursed place. She longs for the day she can leave, when she is too suspiciously young-looking to stay. 

There is a faint pang, when she thinks of Alaric. But the lies and misdirection between them has settled into her like heavy silt, something she’ll never forget. Elena and Damon feel his loss more keenly, she thinks. 

Mack comes back around, and she orders another. The crowd is thin tonight; families are on vacations, she supposes. It’s that time of year. 

She can feel it when he enters the Grill, that familiar quickening of his heartbeat, the woodsy smell of him in the air. Drawing her straw through her icy drink, she doesn’t turn her head, doesn’t shift her body. She doesn’t need to; he makes a beeline right for her. 

“This is a familiar scene.”

Jenna drums her fingers on the skirt of her sundress, glancing John’s way as he sits next to her. “Don’t be an asshole so early in the evening. You won’t have anywhere to go from here,” she drawls. 

His grin is sharp and cutting. “True. You have the right idea though.”

“The house was unbearable. I couldn’t take another moment of it.”

Mack circles around and eyes the two of them, salt-and-pepper eyebrows cocked upwards. “Trouble’s brewin’ right here,” he says.

“Just get me a gin and tonic,” John says tiredly as Jenna smirks. 

“You’ve never had a very thick skin, have you?” she teases, licking the salt from the rim of her glass. 

His eyes fix on her mouth. She feels that flare of heat in her middle, the sweat gathering in the bend of her knees. Tendrils of wavy hair settle at her throat. “The Gilberts aren’t known for it.”

“Jeremy and Elena are pretty tough,” she says. “Maybe the gene just skipped you.”

“It’s not out of the realm of possibility,” he says as Mack brings him his drink. John squeezes the lime into the clear drink and sips. 

They drink in cool silence for a few comfortable moments. She listens half-heartedly to the soft conversations around her, the hum of the air conditioner; there is little of interest (she’s still shallow enough to be curious, and feel no shame over it). Instead, she always strays back to John, the hitch in his breathing, the echo of his pulse. She wonders how it would feel under her lips, all that thin tan skin, taut and sinewy from a summer outdoors and at arms. 

“You’re doing a good job,” he says abruptly. 

Her gaze flickers to him. “Oh god, are you dying?” she blurts out, shocked. 

Scowling, he leans forward, his elbows resting on the bar. “Jesus Christ, no. Just – you’re handling all this really well. And it’s good to have you here, for Elena and Jeremy.”

Wetting her lips, she sips at her drink, weighing her words carefully. “John, it almost sounds like you’re glad I’m not really dead-dead,” she says lightly at last. 

There’s a hand covers hers, heavy on her knee. His eyes are keen and bright, set upon hers. “Of course I am,” he says roughly. 

She stills, his skin overwarm against hers. There’s precedence here, but neither of them are drunk enough for this. 

“You’re a jackass,” she says at last, with no heat behind her words. He is really all she has left, other than Jeremy and Elena. With an eternity in front of her, the past is just that; echoes of childish actions and petty grudges, and a childhood crush turned into an unrequited love that perhaps never died, even when she did. 

John grins, that smug curve of his mouth she’s always secretly enjoyed. His hand curls over hers, their fingers twining on her knee. “That’s not news.”

“Not to anyone who knows you.” She takes a deep breath and finishes her second drink with a flourish. “Why did you stay?”

“For Elena,” he says immediately. 

“Even though she hated you.”

“Past tense?”

Jenna shrugs. “I think Elena can’t have it in her to hate any of us at this point. Better it’s saved for those who truly deserve it.”

John chuckles dryly, finishing his drink and waving down Mack for another. “I abandoned her once. I didn’t want to do it again.”

“Noble of you.”

He glances at her, watching her in silence as Mack sets their round of drinks down. Jenna picks up her glass, her fingers quickly slick with condensation and grainy with specks of salt. Their hands are still joined under the bar. It feels more comfortable than it should. 

“I stayed for you too,” he says at last, soft under the hum of the crowd and the music piping through the ceiling. 

She smiles a little into the rim of her glass, her straw caught at her lips. “You’re getting soft on me, Gilbert.”

“I’ve always been soft for you,” he says evenly.

“That’s not quite how I remember it.”

Tapping the thin skin of her knee, he leans in towards her. “I didn’t want you to feel abandoned either.”

“Sweet of you,” she says dryly, “but I’ve always been fine. Your worry for Elena is natural; any worry you have for me is insane.”

“You’re hard,” he says.

“I had to be, after a while,” she says quietly, looking into her glass. Her parents dying years ago, and then Miranda and Grayson – over the last year, she’s shifted into something fiercer, something stronger. It has nothing to do with the fangs now hiding in her mouth and the chill in her blood. 

John sighs. She can hear him swallow, the pause in his even breathing. His skin is warm and dry against hers. “I’m sorry you were alone.”

They could do this all night, she thinks as she meets his eyes. There’s enough bad blood and past mistakes to keep drinking through many nights. But she’s tired and Elena is sharpening into a warrior of her own creation, ageless and fierce, and Jeremy is still lost in a sea of teenage angst and supernatural concerns. She doesn’t have the time for it all. 

“You’re here now,” is all she says, clinking her glass to his. “Now is what matters.”

They drink. Their hands remain clasped. 

*

John kisses her in the hallway of the Gilbert house, by the guest bedroom that is now his bedroom. He pushes her back against the door as she drags him close to her chest, and he kisses her first because she will not make that move again. She is not nineteen and a child any longer; neither of them are children. 

She is stronger than him now. She pulls the t-shirt from his chest with an accidental tearing and ripping, catching them both off-guard. They laugh through it, hoarse and catching and still too strange to consider. Together they stumble into the bedroom, the house warm and dark around them. The air is thick with the leftover heat of the day and the damp touch of Virginia summers. Sweat gleams on their exposed skins as they stretch out in his bed. She rolls on top of him, straddling him. He is all bones and skin now, worry and action wearing him thin. They are not what they once were. 

“I can hear you sometimes,” she breathes against the pulse in his throat, as his hands search for slick purchase between her thighs. Her fingers slide and her nails scrape over his chest as his thin clever fingers find her clit. 

“I know,” he murmurs back, voice dark as molasses. Her hair falls about their faces, curtaining them from the moonlight trickling in through the wide windows. “Vampire expert, remember?”

“Dirty,” she teases even as her hips roll against his, the slickness growing between her thighs. She bites at his collarbones, the sharp pebbles of his nipples. “Also, no one likes a braggart.”

“I think I can have you singing a different tune, Sommers,” he says with a coy grin. His hands cup her hips and he drags her over his chest, until his face is between her thighs and – 

“ _Oh_ – “ she breathes, arching her back. Her knees hold her weight, digging into the bed, and his palms spread her thighs wide as his mouth covers her clit, his tongue everywhere. She leans into it, whimpering and trembling. There, the hunger she’s lived with for months settles and opens into pleasure, her skin rippling with it. John moans against her skin, wet and wonderful and it’s all she can do not to push for the friction she craves. 

Two long fingers slide into her as his tongue flicks against her clit, curving and stroking. She digs her fingers into his chest and shudders with the arc of his fingers, his tongue, the roll of her hips and the feel of his breaths and moans against her wet skin. All she can do is arch her back and gasp, the walls reverberating with the low hoarse sound of his name on her lips. 

Later, she guides him into her and stretches out over his chest, her hands pinning his wrists above his head. He is all groans and shudders as she rocks her hips against his, setting their pace. The line of his throat is strained and taut; her mouth waters, her tongue touching the pulse there. The touch is like an electric shock to him, his eyes fixed on her. 

She won’t do it, she wants to say. But he just moans her name, hair stuck to his brow with sweat. In the darkness he trusts her, when he probably shouldn’t. That says it all, she thinks. 

After, they shower and she immediately washes his sheets. Elena will be able to smell it if they don’t, she tells him, laughing as he becomes panicky and flustered and scrubs himself all the more. It’s the most settled and normal she’s felt in months. They sit at the island in the kitchen with ice cream and the windows thrown wide open for the breezes, freshly washed and flushed. 

“Don’t take off in the middle of the night,” she says abruptly, dragging her spoon through the carton of black raspberry they’re sharing. 

John fixes his intense gaze on her. “I won’t.”

“Good,” is all she says, tapping her spoon against her teeth lightly. 

Here, they can start again. 

*


End file.
